no et me

The forest has always been an important place for Olivia Gay. She wanders through the woods alone, listening not only to its silence but also to its murmurs. It is a place of creation where her cellist’s instincts are awakened and where she can find peace and quiet outside the city. She joined forces with the Office national des forêts (ONF) in 2022 to raise public awareness of such spaces by inviting spectators to concerts given in the heart of the forest or in natural site. This album continues this project and includes works by Jacques Offenbach, Camille Pépin, Edward Elgar, John Luther Adams and Max Richter; the programme as a whole is under the aegis of Antonin Dvořák’s magnificent Silent Woods , which also lent its name to this initiative.

Purcell’s song output is extensive. Zimmerman, in his analytical catalogue of his music, the Z numbers in the heading, identifies five categories. All are represented in the nineteen songs of this anthology from Carolyn Sampson.

Viennese church music of the generations before Haydn and Mozart is regrettably unfamiliar, and this attractive CD fills in something of the background and helps tell us where Haydn and Mozart were coming from. Antonio Caldara, Venetian by birth, spent several years in Rome, moved to Vienna in 1716 (he was in his mid-forties) as vice-Kapellmeister to Fux and (with regular trips to Salzburg to write operas) stayed 20 years, until his death. He wrote a large quantity of church music, including some 30 festal masses from his Viennese years, of which the main work here seems to me an excellent example. Caldara's rich textures and often very expressive and chromatic harmony, his fluent Italian melodic writing and his resourceful counterpoint, suffuse a work with many striking qualities.